Would love to hear how Abundance work with our Planetary Boundaries being crossed 6of 9 soon 7of9 and all earth system limits being threatened? Really missing this in the conversation. We are not at all seeing an energy transition only an energy addition.
So even though all of this sounds good on paper. How is it at all tied to real resources and a planet in total crisis?
New tech, new housing basically anything we produce new has consequences in and are tied to the material world…
Environmental sustainability is one of the most ubiquitous topics in the book. (And I take it very seriously, and have a master's degree in environmental science...which means nothing other than that these issues really matter to me.) Clearly what we've been doing isn't working, and it's maddening that clean-energy infrastructure is held up when we have the technology. If you're truly interested, I highly recommend giving the book a read with an open mind. In my opinion, if the idea is not to build new housing that people need in order to preserve the planet, I think that's a losing argument, for people and for the planet. Appreciate your comment!
Thanks for your reply, I really appreciate it, and I’ve now read the book with an open mind. I truly value the fresh perspective on the world and politics, but right from the beginning there are some ideas that simply don’t seem grounded in physical reality.
Even if we were to suddenly have an abundance of clean energy tomorrow, energy use remains tightly linked to both GDP and material throughput almost a 1:1 relationship. To have any real chance of turning the climate crisis around, we need both clean energy and a significant reduction in overall consumption.
Flying, lab-grown meat, and solar panels all of these, along with other renewable solutions are still fundamentally tied to material resources. They are “rebuildables,” not free passes. They depend on plastics, oil, wood, rare earths. Take green concrete as one example: if we continue increasing the number of buildings linearly, even if some of them use greener materials, we won’t see a reduction in emissions, we’ll see an overall increase. (Jevons Paradox)
As you know, we’re already deep into ecological overshoot. Some estimates now suggest a potential 50% loss of global GDP just from the actions required to address the climate crisis. If we truly aim to stay within planetary boundaries, the numbers show we can only build about 177,000 new structures per year worldwide. That’s not a political opinion, it’s a reflection of biophysical limits.
The book mentions small modular reactors, but not how long it takes to build them, nor the environmental consequences of doing so or running them or how much it would cost on a planet already under severe stress. They are taking about abundance in 2050 when we most probably have sailed past 2degrees warming and a food system that already now is struggling.
Also who are the abundance for? Global south? Miners? Nature?
I want to be clear: I’m not trying to be a party pooper, I genuinely have high hopes for what humanity can achieve. I don’t want scarcity either. But I do believe we need to face the facts, and begin the creative work from where we are now, with what we actually have. Not from hopes of what might be.
We need to reduce emissions immediately, not someday, once a whole new infrastructure might exist. So far, what I’m reading feels more like speculative fiction than a grounded path forward.
That’s why I’d love to hear your “range”, your generalist take on how we can navigate this polycrisis even if it’s not attractive in the conventional sense.
Or maybe it can be attractive, just in a different way, through community, through deeper relationships with nature and one another, through more time and meaning, rather than more stuff or more from whatever we like now. I just don’t see how abundance fit into that perspective or why it has to?
I enjoyed the candor and informality of this email interview. Regardless of viewpoint, it's so good to hear people share in an unfiltered way what they really think on topics they care a lot about. Thanks David and Derek!
Emily, thanks so much for these kind words. I feel the same, and hope this newsletter continues to be a space for exactly what you described! In the posts, and in the comments as well...
I was so excited to learn (thanks to your fabulous conversation with Forrest Hanson on Being Well) that you write on Substack and found you here just a couple weeks ago. A friend recommended Range a year ago, and I cannot count how many people I've recommended it to. It (your research, the stories, and your own experiences) has been very impactful in my own work and I'm geeking out a little bit that I get to tell you this here...
David, you're killing me. Every time I read your column, my books-to-read list gets longer. :)
Seriously, thanks. BTW, it strikes me that many of the points raised by Thompson and Klein should resonate with the GOP ... if they were sincerely interested in making government work better and not just in dismantling it and replacing it with a kleptocracy. Call me idealistic, but I see room for a bipartisan common ground.
Ha, mea culpa! (But I feel your pain. Across formats I probably average buying a book a day, and clearly I can't read that fast.) ...And I agree with your take. I also think it's one reason why they're getting some heat from liberal audience (as far as I can tell, at least). And I'm sure they expected that, but I think they've prompted really important discussions.
Amazing to me that Klein and Thompsons book has garnered so much attention. It has been so obvious from anyone with a business bone in their body or plain common sense that liberalism and government lethargy, lack of accountability has been stifling growth by holding onto outdated regulations and a bloated self-sustaining bureaucracy. It has decreased housing supply for sure but also created deceleration in every aspect from scientific research to drug approvals. We have become a risk averse, vanilla culture that is attempting to placate everyone equally. Let's pick up the speed, reward meritocracy and people who get stuff done.
Andy G. Have you seen what some greedy developers have done to cities/neighborhoods? The substandard word some construction companies do? If you have not seen this sort of misbehaviour and the harm it does, you have not been looking very close. Note that I was not referring to ALL developers, nor to ALL construction companies, just the greedy and ultra greedy ones. Take a breath.
We heard Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson and historian Ada Palmer on Tuesday at a Chicago Humanities event in Chicago. They were all brilliant! They talked about the book, but also talked about the DESPAIR folks are feeling now, and made the point that despair is an easy way out - an easy way to not do anything. Ada Palmer talked about being hopeful and Derek Thompson talked about doing things and learning while you're doing. They used the example of when building cathedrals, the early builders started out not knowing how to do the dome, but by the time they got to the dome, they knew how to do it. Ezra Klein talked about how he's not necessarily an optimist, but that he stresses Curiosity - we don't know what's going to happen and are often surprised. It was a really inspiring point of view and I'm glad that you wrote about them today. Thanksl
Hey Margit, always great to see you hear! I think they're on to something. I also wouldn't generally call myself an optimist. In fact, Adam Grant identified me as a defensive pessimist, always thinking at the outset that my projects will fail. But that motivates me to work hard to avoid that, and frankly curiosity just trumps whatever part of me is a defensive pessimist, so I start a lot of things. Your framing is really interesting, because one thing I've told myself with book projects is that I want them to be different enough that I have to learn new skills in the middle of the project in order to finish it satisfactorily. It's a mix of harrowing and invigorating!
What a sweet affirming response - thanks so very much. Love your words and thinkng process - defensive pessimism has always been my fallback as well. But unlike despair, it does keep us working harder. you're right.
Also, I'm writing a free column on Substack if you'd like to take a look. My posts are called A Word to the Wise: Cautionary Tales from a Retired Psychologist and come out every Wednesday. I'm having a lot of fun with it. .
Thank you for posting and I appreciate the focus on the topic.
I have to say as an active practitioner in more than one of these areas is that I find the framing and logic to be partial and self-servingly myopic. Almost to the point I just stopped reading and dismissed the whole thing. For every time I hear, "we just need to build more housing," I recall that periods of massive development and housing construction correspond to accelerated price increases. And while the end of that cycle inevitably leads to some moderation, prices remain on an upward trend. The lack of discussion of market governance is a serious point of despair to me as someone who worked very hard on this issue and remains aware that oversimplifying a 'solution' is not helping.
Similarly, the equating of environmental regulation and the institutionalised resistance of big oil and corporate motivations is borderline appalling in its misrepresentation of reality. There is no question regulatory reform is essential, but the permitting takes a very distant back seat to our very conception of energy services and how the whole value chain is treated by policy and regulation.
This doesn't include the egregiously poor points on rural broadband and California high-speed rail. The barriers to realisation are far more complex than asserted here, especially the broadband issue where conservatively-finance regional telecoms are stalling actions to degree well beyond any other barrier.
We can agree that changes are needed, but to present such naively articulated and almost willfully uninformed arguments is telling the very professionals who work on these issues every day that this is not a serious position. If it started with more in-depth documentation and held open the issues without overplaying under-developed solutions, I would engage in this in a meaningful way.
Amazing to me that Klein and Thompsons book has garnered so much attention. It has been so obvious from anyone with a business bone in their body or plain common sense that liberalism and government lethargy, lack of accountability has been stifling growth by holding onto outdated regulations and a bloated self-sustaining bureaucracy. It has decreased housing supply for sure but also created deceleration in every aspect from scientific research to drug approvals. We have become a risk averse, vanilla culture that is attempting to placate everyone equally. Let's pick up the speed, reward meritocracy and people who get stuff done.
Sorry for the late comment, but my copy of the book came in and I'm now about halfway through. Thanks for this post, as always. It's so cool to see two of my favorite writers in conversation! Can you say more about what it was like going to that housing meeting? What struck you? Did it feel like a Parks and Rec town hall?
Your late comments are always welcome! I haven't watched Parks and Rec, so I've got nothing on that front, and I don't mean to demean my neighbors, it's just that, ya know, people move to a neighborhood by choice, or just get used to it, and I think change feels like it's giving preference to the desires of outsiders. (If I had to give a filmic reference, the first thing that popped to mind was "He isn't even from round here" in Hot Fuzz.) And I totally understand that, it's just that, in the long-term, it doesn't contribute to a thriving neighborhood, and it makes it put's Glaeser's "invisible gate" on the community. (Glaeser argues that the ability of incumbents to block development is a huge social justice problem, since we block people from moving to the cities that make them the most productive and improve their social and human capital the most, and force them to move to places that do that less well.) Incumbent power to block outsiders is a problem in everything — immigration, business, housing, etc., for understandable reasons. I think three major impressions of the meetings I went to: 1) It's incredibly emotional for people to think about change in their neighborhood, and they often feel taken by surprise. ("Why am I just hearing about this now?" was often used. Maybe the answer is we have no local news? I'm not really sure...) So I think we have to meet people where they are emotionally. You can't bring data to a knife fight and expect to get somewhere on that alone. 2) A lack of communication from the city or from developers leaves an information vacuum that people will inevitably fill. There are some condos going up near me, and at each meeting it seemed those condos got more expensive. (They didn't actually, but it was like a fishing story. Someone trying to frame them as luxury developments would throw out some price, and it got higher every time, presumably to make them look like they're from out of touch developers). 3) In my opinion (and, again, I'm heavily influenced by Glaeser here), people tend to get some of the causality of cities backward. Cities have a lot of poor people not because the cities make them poor, but because cities make poor people less poor than they would be otherwise (whether that's via work, or social services, or social networks, or public transit, or whatever else). When we assume that the cities are creating rather than attracting poorer citizens, I think we can make some really bad policies. One thing this leads to is incredible barriers to all housing that isn't "affordable housing." So affordable housing becomes a political cause, and also a means for citizens to block or delay a lot of development. Meanwhile, I think there's ample evidence that the most important thing is just to build housing, whatever kind it is, and when you have enough relative to the population some of it becomes affordable. Hence Houston with the extremely low rate of homelessness, and Austin with a massive drop in rent prices amid a rising population. I'm basically parroting Glaeser here, but I found his arguments convincing, and I think it's disastrous that many of the people running cities (never mind motivated-reasoning neighbors) seem to get the causality backward. ... All that said, the "migratory deer" thing actually did come up;)
Ha! I just rewatched a few clips from Hot Fuzz. It's been too long.
This all makes sense to me. I just finished the book (you were right, it was a very interesting read), and both the points it makes and Glaeser's points that you mention seem so sensible that I struggle to come up with a good counterargument. (Whenever this happens, it feels like a sign that I don't actually know enough about the topic yet to have my own opinion.) Anyway, this reminds of something I think I read in an Ibram X. Kendi book where he mentioned people's feelings on Obamacare. His point was that policy change causes public opinion change instead of policy change coming as a result of public opinion change. His example was the ACA under Obama (if I remember correctly). People were very against it until after it happened. Now, it is viewed much more favorably because people have realized it has done more good than they initially thought. My hope is that might happen in this case with housing? That is to say that people might realize more housing in their neighborhood is much less bad in practice than they feared. But the book points out how individuals are much too empowered to stop construction.
Anyway, I found the chapters on the history of science and technological progress to be the most engaging for me. One quote that stuck out was how the US's secret superpower had been the immigration of highly intelligent foreigners. Mike Duncan (the History of Rome podcast guy) had the same lesson about Rome in that its willingness to just absorb people into its empire and offer them protection with minimal friction was its greatest superpower as well. It makes me so sad to see us limiting that today!
Genghis Khan was big on that too, he'd absorb the talents of foreigners rather than crushing them, and prized ability over lineage. There's a famous anecdote about a guy who shot him with an arrow in a battle; that guy's side lost, and Genghis Khan found him afterward and he ended up becoming one of Khan's great generals. ...I worry about this, as you might imagine. I think our higher system, for all it's needed improvements, has been the world's talent draw, and I think it's crazy to undermine that in perception or reality. Back when I was a grad student foreign students were thinking about leaving when labs had to start buying separate equipment for stem cell research (which couldn't use federal funds) versus other research. So you literally were supposed to hae separate staplers and everything if you did any stem cell research. It hurt the brand, but in retrospect it was nothing compared to what's happening now.
Love the Khan anecdote. In his memoir, Phil Knight has a story about when he found someone making really good knockoffs of his product, he'd send them a letter saying to knock it off and then added, "And, by the way, how would you like to come work for us?" – I always thought that was so smart.
Man that's awful. My dad actually works for the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine, which is all about stem cells so that example hits close to home. It's also just so hard because I think tearing down something like higher education can happen so quickly, but undoing that damage (both in perception and reality) would take so much longer. Hopefully the Harvard's stand is successful and can lead to a wider resistance.
Great questions and great answers. Thank you for sharing.
This line particularly hit home: "But progressives put themselves in a box when they refuse to acknowledge the flaws of the status quo just because the Trump administration is attacking it."
What about my remarks could be considered "NIMBYism"? I actively and fully support the building of QUALITY SAFE housing (NO fricking Grenfell Towers!! No homes in Canada's north that need to be wrapped in plastic bags to keep the wind out!!). Developers and builders fully own the horrific outcomes of these sorts of tragedies - SOME developers, SOME builders. And the INDUSTRY allowed for this by constantly lobbying for lower and lower standards. Perhaps you are employed in the sector and your emotions clouded your ability to read and comprehend what I wrote?? Time for QUALITY, SAFE housing for ALL Canadians and that will only be delivered not by speeding things up to breakneck speeds, but by STANDARDS and strict enforcement of these.
Patricia, I am with you. Any argument that starts and ends with "we can just build our way to affordability" is fundamentally not serious and undermines a discussion about the importance of inclusionary zoning, better capital structures and integration of the construction sector, and setting better governance of real estate markets to limit unchecked speculation and profit-taking. Talking to Ed Glaser about this is counter-productive and his logic failings are well documented.
Every time, it seems, a simple approach to a better world is offered, it is put forward in incredibly blinkered and naive ways. Sadly, because I generally am an admirer of Klein's ways of thinking and his journalism.
Would love to hear how Abundance work with our Planetary Boundaries being crossed 6of 9 soon 7of9 and all earth system limits being threatened? Really missing this in the conversation. We are not at all seeing an energy transition only an energy addition.
So even though all of this sounds good on paper. How is it at all tied to real resources and a planet in total crisis?
New tech, new housing basically anything we produce new has consequences in and are tied to the material world…
Environmental sustainability is one of the most ubiquitous topics in the book. (And I take it very seriously, and have a master's degree in environmental science...which means nothing other than that these issues really matter to me.) Clearly what we've been doing isn't working, and it's maddening that clean-energy infrastructure is held up when we have the technology. If you're truly interested, I highly recommend giving the book a read with an open mind. In my opinion, if the idea is not to build new housing that people need in order to preserve the planet, I think that's a losing argument, for people and for the planet. Appreciate your comment!
Thanks for your reply, I really appreciate it, and I’ve now read the book with an open mind. I truly value the fresh perspective on the world and politics, but right from the beginning there are some ideas that simply don’t seem grounded in physical reality.
Even if we were to suddenly have an abundance of clean energy tomorrow, energy use remains tightly linked to both GDP and material throughput almost a 1:1 relationship. To have any real chance of turning the climate crisis around, we need both clean energy and a significant reduction in overall consumption.
Flying, lab-grown meat, and solar panels all of these, along with other renewable solutions are still fundamentally tied to material resources. They are “rebuildables,” not free passes. They depend on plastics, oil, wood, rare earths. Take green concrete as one example: if we continue increasing the number of buildings linearly, even if some of them use greener materials, we won’t see a reduction in emissions, we’ll see an overall increase. (Jevons Paradox)
As you know, we’re already deep into ecological overshoot. Some estimates now suggest a potential 50% loss of global GDP just from the actions required to address the climate crisis. If we truly aim to stay within planetary boundaries, the numbers show we can only build about 177,000 new structures per year worldwide. That’s not a political opinion, it’s a reflection of biophysical limits.
The book mentions small modular reactors, but not how long it takes to build them, nor the environmental consequences of doing so or running them or how much it would cost on a planet already under severe stress. They are taking about abundance in 2050 when we most probably have sailed past 2degrees warming and a food system that already now is struggling.
Also who are the abundance for? Global south? Miners? Nature?
I want to be clear: I’m not trying to be a party pooper, I genuinely have high hopes for what humanity can achieve. I don’t want scarcity either. But I do believe we need to face the facts, and begin the creative work from where we are now, with what we actually have. Not from hopes of what might be.
We need to reduce emissions immediately, not someday, once a whole new infrastructure might exist. So far, what I’m reading feels more like speculative fiction than a grounded path forward.
That’s why I’d love to hear your “range”, your generalist take on how we can navigate this polycrisis even if it’s not attractive in the conventional sense.
Or maybe it can be attractive, just in a different way, through community, through deeper relationships with nature and one another, through more time and meaning, rather than more stuff or more from whatever we like now. I just don’t see how abundance fit into that perspective or why it has to?
There was a deep dive with the authors on The Atlantic's Good on Paper podcast a couple of weeks ago. It's definitely worth a listen: https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2025/03/derek-thompson-and-ezra-klein-abundance/682077/?gift=behqwdM1aNfAObcGOJCJgtPJ_Yqn_go7oW8ijKYiXIo&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
Thanks for the heads-up Mark!
Thanks for the gift link.
I enjoyed the candor and informality of this email interview. Regardless of viewpoint, it's so good to hear people share in an unfiltered way what they really think on topics they care a lot about. Thanks David and Derek!
Emily, thanks so much for these kind words. I feel the same, and hope this newsletter continues to be a space for exactly what you described! In the posts, and in the comments as well...
I was so excited to learn (thanks to your fabulous conversation with Forrest Hanson on Being Well) that you write on Substack and found you here just a couple weeks ago. A friend recommended Range a year ago, and I cannot count how many people I've recommended it to. It (your research, the stories, and your own experiences) has been very impactful in my own work and I'm geeking out a little bit that I get to tell you this here...
Great questions David
Thanks for the kind words! Not sure if we've interacted before, but I've really enjoyed some of your work, Danielle.
Thank you David and ditto!
I was just thinking yesterday that now would be a good time for a new David Epstein post. 😀
I intercepted your thoughts and accepted the request;)
David, you're killing me. Every time I read your column, my books-to-read list gets longer. :)
Seriously, thanks. BTW, it strikes me that many of the points raised by Thompson and Klein should resonate with the GOP ... if they were sincerely interested in making government work better and not just in dismantling it and replacing it with a kleptocracy. Call me idealistic, but I see room for a bipartisan common ground.
Here's hoping.
Ha, mea culpa! (But I feel your pain. Across formats I probably average buying a book a day, and clearly I can't read that fast.) ...And I agree with your take. I also think it's one reason why they're getting some heat from liberal audience (as far as I can tell, at least). And I'm sure they expected that, but I think they've prompted really important discussions.
Amazing to me that Klein and Thompsons book has garnered so much attention. It has been so obvious from anyone with a business bone in their body or plain common sense that liberalism and government lethargy, lack of accountability has been stifling growth by holding onto outdated regulations and a bloated self-sustaining bureaucracy. It has decreased housing supply for sure but also created deceleration in every aspect from scientific research to drug approvals. We have become a risk averse, vanilla culture that is attempting to placate everyone equally. Let's pick up the speed, reward meritocracy and people who get stuff done.
Andy G. Have you seen what some greedy developers have done to cities/neighborhoods? The substandard word some construction companies do? If you have not seen this sort of misbehaviour and the harm it does, you have not been looking very close. Note that I was not referring to ALL developers, nor to ALL construction companies, just the greedy and ultra greedy ones. Take a breath.
Hi David,
We heard Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson and historian Ada Palmer on Tuesday at a Chicago Humanities event in Chicago. They were all brilliant! They talked about the book, but also talked about the DESPAIR folks are feeling now, and made the point that despair is an easy way out - an easy way to not do anything. Ada Palmer talked about being hopeful and Derek Thompson talked about doing things and learning while you're doing. They used the example of when building cathedrals, the early builders started out not knowing how to do the dome, but by the time they got to the dome, they knew how to do it. Ezra Klein talked about how he's not necessarily an optimist, but that he stresses Curiosity - we don't know what's going to happen and are often surprised. It was a really inspiring point of view and I'm glad that you wrote about them today. Thanksl
Hey Margit, always great to see you hear! I think they're on to something. I also wouldn't generally call myself an optimist. In fact, Adam Grant identified me as a defensive pessimist, always thinking at the outset that my projects will fail. But that motivates me to work hard to avoid that, and frankly curiosity just trumps whatever part of me is a defensive pessimist, so I start a lot of things. Your framing is really interesting, because one thing I've told myself with book projects is that I want them to be different enough that I have to learn new skills in the middle of the project in order to finish it satisfactorily. It's a mix of harrowing and invigorating!
What a sweet affirming response - thanks so very much. Love your words and thinkng process - defensive pessimism has always been my fallback as well. But unlike despair, it does keep us working harder. you're right.
Also, I'm writing a free column on Substack if you'd like to take a look. My posts are called A Word to the Wise: Cautionary Tales from a Retired Psychologist and come out every Wednesday. I'm having a lot of fun with it. .
Thank you for posting and I appreciate the focus on the topic.
I have to say as an active practitioner in more than one of these areas is that I find the framing and logic to be partial and self-servingly myopic. Almost to the point I just stopped reading and dismissed the whole thing. For every time I hear, "we just need to build more housing," I recall that periods of massive development and housing construction correspond to accelerated price increases. And while the end of that cycle inevitably leads to some moderation, prices remain on an upward trend. The lack of discussion of market governance is a serious point of despair to me as someone who worked very hard on this issue and remains aware that oversimplifying a 'solution' is not helping.
Similarly, the equating of environmental regulation and the institutionalised resistance of big oil and corporate motivations is borderline appalling in its misrepresentation of reality. There is no question regulatory reform is essential, but the permitting takes a very distant back seat to our very conception of energy services and how the whole value chain is treated by policy and regulation.
This doesn't include the egregiously poor points on rural broadband and California high-speed rail. The barriers to realisation are far more complex than asserted here, especially the broadband issue where conservatively-finance regional telecoms are stalling actions to degree well beyond any other barrier.
We can agree that changes are needed, but to present such naively articulated and almost willfully uninformed arguments is telling the very professionals who work on these issues every day that this is not a serious position. If it started with more in-depth documentation and held open the issues without overplaying under-developed solutions, I would engage in this in a meaningful way.
Amazing to me that Klein and Thompsons book has garnered so much attention. It has been so obvious from anyone with a business bone in their body or plain common sense that liberalism and government lethargy, lack of accountability has been stifling growth by holding onto outdated regulations and a bloated self-sustaining bureaucracy. It has decreased housing supply for sure but also created deceleration in every aspect from scientific research to drug approvals. We have become a risk averse, vanilla culture that is attempting to placate everyone equally. Let's pick up the speed, reward meritocracy and people who get stuff done.
Sorry for the late comment, but my copy of the book came in and I'm now about halfway through. Thanks for this post, as always. It's so cool to see two of my favorite writers in conversation! Can you say more about what it was like going to that housing meeting? What struck you? Did it feel like a Parks and Rec town hall?
Your late comments are always welcome! I haven't watched Parks and Rec, so I've got nothing on that front, and I don't mean to demean my neighbors, it's just that, ya know, people move to a neighborhood by choice, or just get used to it, and I think change feels like it's giving preference to the desires of outsiders. (If I had to give a filmic reference, the first thing that popped to mind was "He isn't even from round here" in Hot Fuzz.) And I totally understand that, it's just that, in the long-term, it doesn't contribute to a thriving neighborhood, and it makes it put's Glaeser's "invisible gate" on the community. (Glaeser argues that the ability of incumbents to block development is a huge social justice problem, since we block people from moving to the cities that make them the most productive and improve their social and human capital the most, and force them to move to places that do that less well.) Incumbent power to block outsiders is a problem in everything — immigration, business, housing, etc., for understandable reasons. I think three major impressions of the meetings I went to: 1) It's incredibly emotional for people to think about change in their neighborhood, and they often feel taken by surprise. ("Why am I just hearing about this now?" was often used. Maybe the answer is we have no local news? I'm not really sure...) So I think we have to meet people where they are emotionally. You can't bring data to a knife fight and expect to get somewhere on that alone. 2) A lack of communication from the city or from developers leaves an information vacuum that people will inevitably fill. There are some condos going up near me, and at each meeting it seemed those condos got more expensive. (They didn't actually, but it was like a fishing story. Someone trying to frame them as luxury developments would throw out some price, and it got higher every time, presumably to make them look like they're from out of touch developers). 3) In my opinion (and, again, I'm heavily influenced by Glaeser here), people tend to get some of the causality of cities backward. Cities have a lot of poor people not because the cities make them poor, but because cities make poor people less poor than they would be otherwise (whether that's via work, or social services, or social networks, or public transit, or whatever else). When we assume that the cities are creating rather than attracting poorer citizens, I think we can make some really bad policies. One thing this leads to is incredible barriers to all housing that isn't "affordable housing." So affordable housing becomes a political cause, and also a means for citizens to block or delay a lot of development. Meanwhile, I think there's ample evidence that the most important thing is just to build housing, whatever kind it is, and when you have enough relative to the population some of it becomes affordable. Hence Houston with the extremely low rate of homelessness, and Austin with a massive drop in rent prices amid a rising population. I'm basically parroting Glaeser here, but I found his arguments convincing, and I think it's disastrous that many of the people running cities (never mind motivated-reasoning neighbors) seem to get the causality backward. ... All that said, the "migratory deer" thing actually did come up;)
Ha! I just rewatched a few clips from Hot Fuzz. It's been too long.
This all makes sense to me. I just finished the book (you were right, it was a very interesting read), and both the points it makes and Glaeser's points that you mention seem so sensible that I struggle to come up with a good counterargument. (Whenever this happens, it feels like a sign that I don't actually know enough about the topic yet to have my own opinion.) Anyway, this reminds of something I think I read in an Ibram X. Kendi book where he mentioned people's feelings on Obamacare. His point was that policy change causes public opinion change instead of policy change coming as a result of public opinion change. His example was the ACA under Obama (if I remember correctly). People were very against it until after it happened. Now, it is viewed much more favorably because people have realized it has done more good than they initially thought. My hope is that might happen in this case with housing? That is to say that people might realize more housing in their neighborhood is much less bad in practice than they feared. But the book points out how individuals are much too empowered to stop construction.
Anyway, I found the chapters on the history of science and technological progress to be the most engaging for me. One quote that stuck out was how the US's secret superpower had been the immigration of highly intelligent foreigners. Mike Duncan (the History of Rome podcast guy) had the same lesson about Rome in that its willingness to just absorb people into its empire and offer them protection with minimal friction was its greatest superpower as well. It makes me so sad to see us limiting that today!
Genghis Khan was big on that too, he'd absorb the talents of foreigners rather than crushing them, and prized ability over lineage. There's a famous anecdote about a guy who shot him with an arrow in a battle; that guy's side lost, and Genghis Khan found him afterward and he ended up becoming one of Khan's great generals. ...I worry about this, as you might imagine. I think our higher system, for all it's needed improvements, has been the world's talent draw, and I think it's crazy to undermine that in perception or reality. Back when I was a grad student foreign students were thinking about leaving when labs had to start buying separate equipment for stem cell research (which couldn't use federal funds) versus other research. So you literally were supposed to hae separate staplers and everything if you did any stem cell research. It hurt the brand, but in retrospect it was nothing compared to what's happening now.
Love the Khan anecdote. In his memoir, Phil Knight has a story about when he found someone making really good knockoffs of his product, he'd send them a letter saying to knock it off and then added, "And, by the way, how would you like to come work for us?" – I always thought that was so smart.
Man that's awful. My dad actually works for the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine, which is all about stem cells so that example hits close to home. It's also just so hard because I think tearing down something like higher education can happen so quickly, but undoing that damage (both in perception and reality) would take so much longer. Hopefully the Harvard's stand is successful and can lead to a wider resistance.
Great questions and great answers. Thank you for sharing.
This line particularly hit home: "But progressives put themselves in a box when they refuse to acknowledge the flaws of the status quo just because the Trump administration is attacking it."
More like this.
David - in all your free time, you should check out The Disappearing Spoon Podcast about Penicillin: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/moldy-mary-the-forgotten-mother-of-penicillin/id1506994358?i=1000630830907
What about my remarks could be considered "NIMBYism"? I actively and fully support the building of QUALITY SAFE housing (NO fricking Grenfell Towers!! No homes in Canada's north that need to be wrapped in plastic bags to keep the wind out!!). Developers and builders fully own the horrific outcomes of these sorts of tragedies - SOME developers, SOME builders. And the INDUSTRY allowed for this by constantly lobbying for lower and lower standards. Perhaps you are employed in the sector and your emotions clouded your ability to read and comprehend what I wrote?? Time for QUALITY, SAFE housing for ALL Canadians and that will only be delivered not by speeding things up to breakneck speeds, but by STANDARDS and strict enforcement of these.
Patricia, I am with you. Any argument that starts and ends with "we can just build our way to affordability" is fundamentally not serious and undermines a discussion about the importance of inclusionary zoning, better capital structures and integration of the construction sector, and setting better governance of real estate markets to limit unchecked speculation and profit-taking. Talking to Ed Glaser about this is counter-productive and his logic failings are well documented.
Every time, it seems, a simple approach to a better world is offered, it is put forward in incredibly blinkered and naive ways. Sadly, because I generally am an admirer of Klein's ways of thinking and his journalism.
Those quantum thoughts… 😁